Getting the Spirit of the New Year

New Congregate

Just wanted to say I have enjoyed your writings in the Urban Tulsa Weekly. I like the perspective you have on the application of the Gospel to our lives. Often I find myself standing in the Religious Line and my Spirit leaps when I am shown a different avenue.

This week's "Three Aspects" ("Whittled Down," UTW Nov. 17-23) is such a perspective. I liked it very much and pray that changes in me can happen, that my walk with Jesus occurs continuously, not just in brief flashes.

What and where is your Church & service times. I would like to come and attend a live sermon sometime. In Christ's Good Grace.

--Michael Ansorge

Leave a Legacy

I wanted to take a moment and tell you how I appreciated your writing in this week's issue of Urban Tulsa ("For Whom the Church Bell Tolls," UTW Dec. 22-28).

I think it is a very insightful discussion of the Faith in this city.

I am a Gregorian Friar that works with Tulsa's poor and homeless, and I believe if the Church stays behind our stained glass walls, we will die a slow death. I think that if you want to see lives changed, take Jesus to the streets.

I know many of the pastors you mentioned in that article, especially Jeff Taylor [is] a good friend.

Anyway, great article.

--Br. James Patrick Hall, BSG

Change Your Stripes

I love my misanthropic and curmudgeonly social and political commentators -- Swift, Bierce, Orwell, Twain and Menken -- like anyone else. However, Ted Rall, having thoroughly mastered the cursing of the darkness, is morphing into a Johnny-One-Note-Meets-Chicken-Little ideologue. Any chance he might ever light us a candle and show us some different shades of black? Or at least an occasional guerilla attack of comic relief? A spoonful of sugar can make the medicine go down.

--David S. Lawrence

Progress and Abortion

Leftist thinking captures many ideas, but a common denominator of them all is progressivism. That is to say, leftist ideas are progressive, leading to progress, helping "advance." A progressive society is a society which advances, its members get more and more rights every time, they are increasingly better protected against contingencies: housing, illness, unemployment, ageing. On the other hand, a non-progressive society is conservative and does not "advance," there are more and more unequal rights among its members, and there are many members who are excluded for different reasons and are forced to live on the margins of that society -- the unemployed, low classes, gays, etc.

This classification is given by leftism to its own ideology and is indisputable, as long as there is no evidence to the contrary -- there hardly ever is. The thinking we might define as not leftist has a lower starting value because it is not "progressive." These clichés are widely accepted today by the entire political class we might call leftist (of course), and by a large part of the rightist political class -- something which is outrageous.

Having thus admitted that leftist thinking is "progressive," I find it very difficult to understand this eagerness for imposing the abortion law awaiting us. Is it progressive to kill? Can an advancing society keep on advancing with 100,000 abortions each year? And what about aborting mothers? How can one oppose the death penalty for convicts (I do myself) while defending the death penalty for someone who has not been born yet because he or she is an embryo, or a less than 14-week old fetus, or has an alleged malformation and is still less than 22 weeks old? Where is progress here? Where are we advancing to, other than to an abyss? Is not the case rather as follows?

First we offer Heaven to our youths through an insane sexual conduct (the earlier you start your sexual life and the more promiscuous you are, the better for you); if this results in unwanted pregnancies, don't worry because you can have an abortion and nothing has happened here; and when after so much craziness there are consequences in the form of psychological damage for the woman (the main victim in this entire tragedy, along with the unborn child), we will have a new subject who will joyfully accept any new instruction she is given.

It is paradoxical to learn that the two most harmful regimes known to humankind, i.e. Nazism and Stalinist Communism, used to encourage the most irresponsible sexuality ever, open only to instinct, and the easiness for having abortions was even greater than what this law seeks. The bigwigs in these regimes were well aware of this: the more dehumanized the individual became, the easier his/her control by the powerful state apparatus over which they ruled. Basically, all inhuman laws -- and this abortion law is -- ultimately seek to turn people into subjects under a powerful state. Be careful.

--Alejandro Perez